Outgoing President's Report for the year 2000The millennial year 2000 was an active one for ISBA. A number of end-of-year reports from officers and committees, as well as minutes of Board and General Meetings, are now or will soon be made public on the ISBA website (http://www.bayesian.org/), so I shall just mention a few highlights here. The most notable ISBA activity was without doubt the highly successful ISBA 2000 meeting in Crete. Many people put much effort into organising this, with results that were greatly appreciated by all participants. Thanks to the generosity of Eurostat, all ISBA members will be receiving a free copy of the Proceedings in due course. Further details can be found in the reports of the ISBA Program Council, the ISBA 2000 Scientific Committee, and the ISBA 2000 Proceedings Editor. Other noteworthy developments relate to prizes. At the request of the trustees of the Leonard J. Savage Memorial Fund, responsibility for managing the Savage Award for the best Bayesian doctoral dissertation (recently increased to two annual awards of $750 each, one for Theory and Methods, and one for Applied Methodology) has been transferred to ISBA. The ISBA by-laws have been augmented to reflect this. We have established a Savage Fund Committee, consisting of Ehsanolah Soofi (Chair), Peter Rossi, Arnold Zellner, Wes Johnson, Michael Evans and Clare Marshall, which includes representatives of the award's co-sponsors: ASA Section on Bayesian Statistical Science, and NBER-NSF Seminar on Bayesian Inference in Econometrics. In addition, the retiring Savage Fund trustees (Stephen Fienberg, Seymour Geisser, Ed Leamer, Jay Kadane and John Pratt) are emeritus members of this committee. A call for nominations for the 2000 awards has been made and is now closed. The evaluation committee will be chaired by Siddhartha Chib. Further details may be found on the ISBA website under "News" and "ISBA Awards". At the ISBA 2000 meeting the organisers of the Valencia conferences decided to initiate two new prizes, to honour towering figures in Bayesian Statistics. The Dennis V. Lindley prize will be awarded biennially for the best contributed paper in the refereed proceedings of the Valencia Meeting or of the ISBA World Meeting. The Morris H. DeGroot prize will be awarded biennially to the author or authors of a published book in statistical science. Capital funding for these prizes has been obtained from a number of founders, including ISBA. Again, responsibility for managing these prizes has been transferred to ISBA, and further details may be viewed on the website. Other business conducted by ISBA during the year included some revision of the by-laws regarding membership and dues, and the constitution of committees to consider the possibility of electronic publishing of a journal, and to increase the usefulness and informativeness of the website for interested non-members. On 16 March 2000 ISBA was (re)incorporated in the State of Iowa by Alicia Carriquiry. During the course of the year a new Brazilian Chapter of ISBA was formed, to join existing chapters in India, South Africa and Chile. See the website under "Local Chapters". The ISBA Newsletter has been "relaunched" as the ISBA Bulletin, and goes from strength to strength under the energetic editorship of Fabrizio Ruggeri. You will have noticed that ISBA has a smart new logo. This is Petros Dellaportas's winning entry in our logo competition. Thank you Petros, and I hope you enjoy your prize -- a free holiday back at the ISBA 2000 hotel venue in Crete, thanks to the generosity of the hotel manager. Thanks too to all who voted, thus providing valuable testing of the new system for electronic voting which has since been used for the ISBA elections. As I leave the Oval Office, I should like to express my sincere thanks (and distribute presidential pardons) to all those who are also stepping down at this time from service to ISBA. John Geweke has completed his term as Past President, and retires from the Executive and the Board. Robert Wolpert, having served as Program Chair in 1999, now rotates off Program Council. Michael Evans relinquishes his position as Executive Secretary, although he will be continuing as Webmaster. The retiring Board members are Alan Gelfand, Jay Kadane, Rob Kass and Luis Pericchi, who served as ISBA Directors from 1997 to 2000. All these individuals have contributed greatly to the organisation and smooth running of ISBA, for which they deserve your gratitude as well as mine. It only remains to congratulate all those who succeeded in the recent ISBA elections, and to wish Alicia and her team all success for the coming year. Philip Dawid |